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cgriffin21 writes "Facebook and Skype are reportedly in talks over a deal that would integrate Skype calling capabilities into Facebook user accounts. Such an agreement would give both Skype and Facebook not only a leg up on rival VoIP and social networking services from the likes of Google, but also the combined force of two Internet-based services beloved by consumers. The talks, which were reported by All Things Digital on Wednesday, stem from Facebook's goal of merging IP communications and social networking communities more closely together. Facebook in recent weeks had also been rumored to be developing a mobile device of its own."

You don't GROW laptops. Geez. No, obviously he mined all the metals and drilled for all the petroleum, smelted the metals, refined the oil to plastic, and hand built his system. He's very proud of it. It's the equivalent of a 386, and it only took him 24 years to make.

I (at least these days) always think of the business concept of a "consumer" as being a thoughtless, emotion-driven automaton that exists solely to purchase goods and services provided by businesses, mainly because of the language used that refers to "consumers" in such contexts.

But yeah, we (almost all) consume in the sense that we buy stuff. Technically, growing your own stuff consumes resources too.

Consumer, the term, is a pejorative. It implies that I am some sort of reverse landfill that will hand out money to any garbage truck full of products that gets dumped in my vicinity.

I am not a consumer. I am a *potential* customer. That implies that I am careful about how I spend my money, and that I value a company that attempts to forge a good relationship with me. I am not likely to buy something merely because it's on sale down at the feed farm.

I know it's hip to hate on Facebook (and Skype too? Why not) but don't fool yourself into thinking that those services aren't enormously popular worldwide. For many people, keeping in touch with loved ones is are the most important thing they do with their computers.

...And how is that? Look, a ton of people are on Facebook and they are easy to find and people are on there often. Ok, sure, if you only communicate with a few people, yeah, e-mail and phone calls will work, but that doesn't always scale. For one, e-mails oftentimes fail for one reason or another (spam filters, people don't check e-mails often, it gets ignored, etc), even international texting rates are insanely expensive, if you want to talk to someone in another country, you can't just call them on the ph

So, IM clients, with the varied accounts are hard to keep track of, but social media sites aren't? Facebook is pretty popular these days, but a lot of people also have some combination of MySpace, LinkedIn, and Twitter. Everyone has their favorite, so it's not to difficult to find out that someone will get do the same thing to Facebook that they do to MSN: Download it, friend you, and never log in again.

Widely used is not synonymous with beloved. The local DMV is widely used, but you'll be hard pressed to find anyone calling it beloved.

About two months ago there was a Slashdot [slashdot.org] article indicating that on average, people are very dissatisfied with Facebook, but they keep using it because Facebook is a de facto monopoly, thanks to the network effect.

Personally, I can't stand Facebook, but I use it because I've got too many friends who refuse to respond to email. I'll continue to hate on it until they solve

Oh, and one more thing: if we went federated social with XMPP instead of FB, the VOIP and video would already be available with no work. In fact, FB exposes XMPP so they should be able to get voice/video pretty easily, too. Why do they need Skype?

Because XMPP is just a protocol and they need software - and Skype (the company) has a team with years of experience of developing VoIP software for the consumer market (as in, not business) with social networking capabilities and a most recognize brand in the sector (Works with Skype(TM) is very common nowadays).

I wonder what impact this might have on magic jack. I've used that service far more than any other type of online communications. It also has a nice feature of letting me take it oversea's and as long as i have a high speed connection, i can still make any phone calls back to north america for free.

I'll tell you what it's going to do; it's going to Slap Chop your little Magic Jack into the afterlife, where it will meet Billy Mays, dressed in OxyClean bleached ultra-white angel clothes, buffing his harp with a ShamWow, and re-affixing it to his head with some Mighty Putty.

I had to look up Magic Jack, and I don't see what the relevance is. It looks just like a standard VoIP service that bundles an adaptor that you can plug an old phone into? My SIP provider doesn't bundle such things (and I'd have no use for it if they did), but I can buy them from their online store quite cheaply. Or I can use a software SIP client, including the one built into my mobile phone, so I can make calls via them whenever I am near WiFi.

It just hasn't peaked yet. You'll see. Facebook is the flavor of the month and it WILL go the way of myspace. It's just not going to have legs to stand on when people tire of the lack of attention to it's basic features, security, and all the attention on adding the latest answers to questions not asked; geolocating me and my stupid posts, unwanted tagging, badly integrated media types, shitty apps filled with malware and ads, etc. Yeah, Grandma and Grandpa are going to be "sticky" to facebook in two ye

This is exactly my point. "Flavor of the month" for *six fucking years*, and *still* going strong. Honestly, people like you amuse me... so deluded, *convinced* that, because Facebook personally offends you, it must just be, like, a fad.

Look, I know *you* don't like Facebook. But guess what? The world is different, now, compared to when Myspace was all the rage. Today, grandma's and uncles are using Facebook. It's not simply some teenage fad, and has embedded itself

This is/., Skype is, dare I say it, I dare, fashionable./. has a raging hate-on for anything deemed fashionable. Except for being fashionable by hating anything else that's fashionable. That sort of fashionable is A-OK.

Google Chat uses XMPP, and you can talk to their users without being part of their network.

The Google Talk network supports open interoperability with hundreds of other communications service providers through a process known as federation. This means that a user on one service can communicate with users on another service without needing to sign up for, or sign in with, each service.

IRC networks like EFnet also have plenty of federated servers with different admins; and others, like OFTC are managed by no

All your communications flow through a single operator. If you use GChat, it flows through Google. It might eventually end up in another network through federation, but Google sees it all. IRC? SMS? Telephone? Same fucking deal. So if you're paranoid about Skype, you should be paranoid about all of the above.

That point was not related to information security at all, yet you apparently accuse me of infosec paranoia (the point was about choice, but more on that in end of the post). Security is just an example of the many things that can go wrong when users choices are artificially limited.

This is what matters: with Skype and other communication methods that work over proprietary protocols I'm tied to whoever owns the protocol. If the provider becomes evil, my _only_ choices are to stop communicating totally using

Skype is proprietary, uses a proprietary protocol and has taken extreme measures to obfuscate their traffic and functioning of their program. And the Linux version is just horrible in every way possible.

Well, good thing you don't use any instant messaging platforms, right? Or make a call on a POTS line or a cell phone? Or send a text message?

Not the original poster, but:

I use XMPP. I run my own server and I can chat with anyone using any XMPP server connected to the Internet. Quite a few of my contacts use the one operated by Google (a few have their own domain and point it at Google's server, so they can move if they stop trusting Google without any of their contacts knowing or caring). Some use the XMPP server run by my local university's computer society. Others use ones run by other organisations, and a few run their own. They can do

Skype sucks because it is closed, and no one knows how it handles the key exchange. If Skype were serious about security, they could still be proprietary but would at least be open about exactly how the encryption works, and they would also almost certainly have a way for users to be their own trusted introducers so that people could use it with confidence that there is no MitM.

But they don't, so they are very likely a trap. People have been bitching about thi

Sadly Skype has now crossed the divide and joined the establishment (evil telco's). Try using Skype on just about any cell phone and you'll find that they've done deals to force you onto 3G, voice minutes or some other evil trick to make sure they don't undermine telco profits - even on supposedly free platforms like Android where they have absolutely no obligation to do that. Why have they done it? Simple: they've sold their soul to deprive you of freedom and make a few cheap bucks for themselves. So

I haven't checked recently, but what's the status of voip over jabber? We've seeing a lot of collusion and conglomeration between monolithic "walled garden" services, and I think we'll see more of it. The open source community has alternatives, but I'm starting to think we're going to have to step up our game to fight the momentum that the closed systems have.

I think it's positive that Diaspora was able to raise $200k through crowd-sourcing, and I don't agree with people who say it was a waste of money, if only because it showed it was possible. But the reality is that $200k is pennies in comparison to the funds that Facebook, Skype, and others have. And I think it's fair to say that for every talented, idealistic open source programmer willing to work on the side to open the up communication channels, whether it's the web or voip or anything else, there's dozens of talented developers willing to take large salaries to work on proprietary, walled software.

We seem to have solved a lot of the questions that open source brought up when it was first popularized by Linux (management, how to make a profit, etc), but we still have some big questions to ask in terms of how to fund these projects while maintaining independence, and how to compete with well-funded corporations that have an invested interest in keeping things proprietary and walled off. Not just on features, but on user interface and experience, stability, scalability, and other software design concerns.

I don't know if I have any answers, but I'd sure love to hear suggestions. Call it the next big challenge for open source, but we increasingly need to be able to make user-facing software that appeals to the least savvy of users, we need to make it open and flexible, and we need to make it compete with the cycle of new features that come out of proprietary software with massive bank accounts.

Now all we need is a jabber server that isn't a huge PITA to setup for authentication etc etc.

Seriously, I got jabber to authenticate against an LDAP but it was a huge amount of hackery to do so. The thought of trying to add VOIP and/or H264 video capabilities into the mix is scary, much as I'd love to do so...

There are already secure GPLed VOIP clients, several of them. They are all internet-only, afaik, and that's the way it should be, if you think about it for about 4 seconds. Let the copper and the cells die already: their architecture and/or protocols are vastly inferior to the internet's for every purpose imaginable.

There is already a "social networking app" that is infinitely more configurable than all the commercial ones put together, and has bullet-proof security. It's called Apache.

This would make a lot of sense if the rumours about facebook making its own phone are true. This way you get a new phone, login to FB on it and it's setup. This is actually really similar to how motoblur (android) works. Except in this case, all phone calls would also be VoIP, thus potentially making the first all data phone!

Oh how I can't wait until we don't need voice plans anymore, and it's 100% data for everything. I'm also waiting for cable TV to take the big one though, and everyone just has internet,

Of course, you will still want to have high-priority and low-priority data. So your voice communications data will still be purchased in a different lump than your regular "whenever you get to it" data.

No, there is no need for your ISP to prioritize your VoIP traffic on their end. This should all be done on your home network in your router. QoS needs to improve in home routers & even hacker friendly routers based on OpenWRT like Tomato or DD-WRT have broken QoS implementations. There may be special situations where a higher level service is required, but for the vast majority of consumers hooking up with a decent quality VoIP provider and using a decent router w/ QoS will provide excellent service. Ev

Who needs a voice plan? I certainly don't. It would be FAR cheaper if I didn't have one. Ah, and there's the rub. The current cell phone companies will fight the affordable data only plan on anything resembling a phone until they're dead and buried with the bones salted and burned.

I like SIP because it is a open standard, and I do not use Skype because there is no free software which allows me to talk to those who are using it. If Facebook and Skype teams up then that will likely make it even more the de-facto standard like MSN is for IM and it will probably be the total nail in the coffin for SIP. I see this as very bad news indeed.

SIP is the best quality solution but you have to realise that setting up a sip account is beyond the ability of most ordinary people.

I have a lot of friends who use facebook and very few use Skype even less who use sip. If Skype becomes as easy as go to your facebook page then the number of people i know using skype wouldnt double it would be around 10 -20 times as many.

people in general are scared of computers, and don't want to install anything.

Let me put it this way on facebook i have a number of friends most of which i have been out with, partied with over the years and even baby sat their kids (we are not teenagers any more).

If I wanted to chat about something computing related lets say java or netbeans the number that have a background to do so is zero. When chatting most use facebook chat and are a bit put out when its not working right which seems to be fairly regular. The number that use Skype is one or two and sip: non-existant.

I am both a Skype and Facebook user. This move will mean that I'll stop using Skype. Maybe Google Voice will pick me up as a user, maybe someone else. I don't want my facebook tied to skype or anything else. I won't log onto another website with my facebook account. I won't use google mail, because I use google search....and so on. All these companies are bad enough on their own. This drive to merge, will only drive me away. Every time I read a story like this, I end up googling for disapora (only to see th

I am both a Skype and Facebook user. This move will mean that I'll stop using Skype. Maybe Google Voice will pick me up as a user, maybe someone else. I don't want my facebook tied to skype or anything else. I won't log onto another website with my facebook account. I won't use google mail, because I use google search....and so on. All these companies are bad enough on their own. This drive to merge, will only drive me away. Every time I read a story like this, I end up googling for disapora (only to see th

As long as I can continue to use my beloved Skype without touching that pariah called Facebook I don't care what they do together. The first time they require a Facebook login or some such nonsense will be the end of my long and mutually profitable venture with Skype.

I don't know if there's any paid subscription with Facebook. But, I currently pay Skype with my Credit Card. I don't know who keeps this information (e.g. if Skype) keeps in database. Would this merger not give Facebook to link its users with their credit card info? Certainly, with the amount of info kept on FB, the CC info if kept by Skype and all the phone numbers you call, it doesn't seem to be a good mix of sharing of information.

I use Skype almost daily to video chat with someone on the opposite side of the earth. Not sure why there are so many haters - I know there are problems with the company and I wish it was more open, but for most people (including Linux users as they do have an official Linux client) it's an incredibly useful service that just works.

Anyway at my end, I use a macbook pro and since I'm on slashdot you might guess I have no problem doing anything on computers. But, at the other end is someone with much less edu

Not sure why there are so many haters - I know there are problems with the company and I wish it was more open, but for most people (including Linux users as they do have an official Linux client) it's an incredibly useful service that just works.

There are so many haters because skype doesn't use an open protocol, won't play nice with other voip providers, etc. All proper commercial setups run sip, that they don't segregates professional voip with end user stuff which is very inconvenient.